Overview
The Classic Guide to Influence
Now Fully Revised & Updated!
"If you want to be a successful leader at any level, you must learn the mastery of managers and groups without using formal authority. You need the ideas and skills this book delivers."
—Ram Charan, author of the bestselling books Execution and Confronting Reality
"This book manages to do the near impossible...It draws on the wisdom of good leadership studies to provide tools to influence people and events at work regardless of the positions we hold."
—Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Associate Dean Yale School of Management
"In its first edition, Influence Without Authority established itself as a useful guidebook to modern organization practice. With the added content of this new edition it becomes a 'bible'!"
—Len Schlesinger, Vice Chairman and COO Limited Brands
Even more relevant now than it was when it was first published more than a decade ago, Influence Without Authority, Second Edition is the classic guide to getting things done with colleagues, customers, and management—any situation in which you are not in charge, but must get results. This new edition also includes guidelines for applying the powerful Exchange Model to:
— Influencing a team, task force, or committee
— Influencing departments and divisions
— Initiating or leading major change
— Using Indirect influence
— Overcoming organizational politics
— Playing hardball—when you can no longer catch flies with honey
Influence Without Authority, Second Edition offers a reliable, time-tested plan for getting cooperation from those who command the resources, information, or support you need. The authors show you how to negotiate using the currencies people value most in their own day-to-day work life, so you can turn anyone into an ally. With powerful techniques for cutting through interpersonal and interdepartmental barriers, this business classic shows you how to achieve your goals by motivating people over whom you have no authority.
This highly successful book already is having an impact on the way things are done in corporations, government, and nonprofit organizations. The authors lay the foundations for a dynamic new age management ethic as they demonstrate how to use the Law of Reciprocity for mutual benefit and offer techniques for managing upwards and laterally as well as downwards.
Synopsis
In organizations today, getting work done requires political and collaborative skills. That’s why the first edition of this book has been widely adopted as a guide for consultants, project leaders, staff experts, and anyone else who does not have direct authority but who is nevertheless accountable for results. In this revised edition, leadership gurus Allan Cohen and David Bradford explain how to get cooperation from those over whom you have no official authority by offering them help in the form of the “currencies” they value. This classic work, now revised and updated, gives you powerful techniques for cutting through interpersonal and interdepartmental barriers, and motivating people to lend you their support, time, and resources.
Publishers Weekly
This guide by management consultant Cohen and Stanford University Graduate School of Business professor Bradford skillfully demonstrates, with numerous examples, how managers and other employees can achieve their career objectives--as well as those of their companies--by forming mutually advantageous alliances. Urging patient planning of strategies, the authors offer advice on coping with turf rivalries, handling delicate inter-level relations and tips on how to bypass rules and foster managerial flexibility and innovation. Macmillan's Executive Program dual main selection; Fortune Book club alternate. (Dec.)